6 – Heinrich Muller
The next on our list of missing Nazis is one of the closest of all to the Führer himself – so close, indeed, that he was known to have been in Berlin in the Bunker with Hitler when he committed suicide. And like his fellow high-ranking Nazi, Martin Bormann, it was in that Bunker that he was last sighted, on the 1st of May 1945.
Heinrich Müller was one of the top men in the regime, the head of the Gestapo and arguably the highest-placed man in the Nazi government never to have been located after the war. One of the reasons behind his disappearance and lack of capture was his name: Heinrich Müller is one of the most common names in Germany and even within the apparatus of the Nazi state, he was referred to as Gestapo Müller to differentiate him from another Heinrich Müller, an SS General. Because of his very common name – he didn’t even have a middle name, which could have identified him among other Heinrich Müllers – he could have slipped any checkpoint that he might have come across. How were they to know that the Heinrich Müller who stood before them was Gestapo Müller, the head of the notorious secret police?
How he got out, and what he did after the war, has long been debated. It was suspected that he might have got himself onto a ratline and made his way to South America. When captured, Adolf Eichmann told his interrogators in Israel that he thought Müller to still be alive. Another theory holds that, as the head of the Gestapo, Müller was in possession of vital information to both sides of the Cold War that would follow the Second World War, and thus was harbored by one of the Allies.
The Soviets and Czechoslovakians were accused regularly in the West of having taken Müller in, and the CIA was convinced for a long time that he had been spirited away to somewhere in the Soviet Union. In 1961, a leading member of the Polish intelligence services admitted as much when he defected to the West, though his claims could not be substantiated. It could just be that, like so many other, he perished in the rubble of Berlin. Without a body, however, there will always be a mystery and, as everything in the Cold War, there will always be rumors that he was used by the other side to gain an advantage.